Active Phase for Activated Random Walks on the Lattice in all Dimensions

Abstract: We show that the critical density of the Activated Random Walk model on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ is strictly less than one when the sleep rate $\lambda$ is small enough, and tends to $0$ when $\lambda\to 0$, in any dimension $d\geqslant 1$. As far as we know, the result is new for $d=2$. We prove this by showing that, for high enough density and small enough sleep rate, the stabilization time of the model on the $d$-dimensional torus is exponentially large. To do so, we fix the the set of sites where the particles eventually fall asleep, which reduces the problem to a simpler model with density one. Taking advantage of the Abelian property of the model, we show that the stabilization time stochastically dominates the escape time of a one-dimensional random walk with a negative drift. We then check that this slow phase for the finite volume dynamics implies the existence of an active phase on the infinite lattice.